Introduction: The infra-ordinary

‘There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies’

Raoul Vaneigem¹

On Friday 12 March 1937, a series of uninteresting events unfolded across Britain. In Liverpool, a young office worker riding his bike accidentally knocked down an elderly woman, and a labourer told him off for not ringing his bell. He went out at lunchtime to buy a hat for his wedding, and then ate at a Lyons Corner House with a friend. In a Birmingham suburb, a housewife was awakened from a strange dream about the author Aldous Huxley by her five-year-old son singing nursery rhymes. She waited for a man to call to read the gas meter, before going out to return some library books. In Northumberland, an accountant rose at 7.50 a.m. and decided to postpone shaving because he was going to a dance in the evening. At lunchtime he withdrew some money from the bank. On the evening train home, he noticed his fellow passengers had made little circles in the steamed-up windows with their coat sleeves so they could look out, which reminded him of ‘wiping the bloom off a plum’.²

Riding a bike to work, going for lunch, waiting in for the gasman, taking back library books, neglecting to shave, commuting on trains. These banal, unconnected events – familiar even to our 21st-century eyes – had one thing in common. The people who lived through them all recorded them in their ‘day surveys’, in which they simply described what happened to them on the twelfth day of each month, however mundane. It was part of a project called Mass-Observation, which investigated the hidden significance of people’s routine lives. This project began in January 1937, when three young men – Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge – wrote a joint letter to the New Statesman, inviting volunteers to co-operate in a new research project, an ‘anthropology at home’.³ Harrisson had spent a year with a tribal community in Malekula in the western Pacific, where he found that cannibals were at least as civilised as his fellow Old Harrovians, and he vowed to apply the insights he had acquired there to a study of ‘the cannibals of Lancashire, the head-hunters of Stepney’.⁴

Mass-Observation wanted to thwart the tendency in modern mass society to live our daily lives deadened by habit, ‘with as little consciousness of our surroundings as though we were walking in our sleep’.⁵ It soon became notorious for paying minute attention to apparently trifling topics. Its researchers counted the average number of chips in each portion at Bolton fish-and-chip shops, recorded the conversations taking place in Blackpool’s public lavatories at 5.30 p.m. each day, and wrote reports on ‘The application of face cream’ and ‘Upper and middle-class soup-eating habits’. And they combined a voracious thirst for arcane knowledge with an ingenious approach to research methodology. A researcher in Bolton, for instance, took the subject of one of his investigations to the pictures, and ended up making love with her in a shop doorway⁶ – a form of participant-observation not generally recommended in scholarly anthropology. But while the press dismissed them as ‘busy-bodies’, ‘snoopers’ and ‘psychoanthropologic nosey-parkers’,⁷ Mass-Observation captured the public imagination. Thousands of people signed up as volunteers, and one of its early books, Britain (1939), sold 100,000 copies in the ten days after publication.⁸

Why did Mass-Observation have such an intense impact? The main reason, I think, is that it is very rare to explore routine daily life in this detailed, ambitious way – to shine what one atypically appreciative newspaper article called ‘a searchlight on living’.⁹ For this is a world that we normally regard as too prosaic to be worthy of notice. The French author Georges Perec calls it the ‘infra-ordinary’: that part of our lives that is so routine as to become almost invisible, like infrared light.¹⁰ Perec spent his whole career trying to make the ‘infra-ordinary’ more visible by lavishing it with the kind of painstaking attention we normally reserve for earth-shattering events and grand passions. His book Species of Spaces (1974) simply lists all the objects he can see in his apartment and neighbourhood. He urges his readers to do the same with the contents of their own lives, looking afresh at how streets are named, houses are numbered and cars are parked – and not worrying about whether these subjects have some pre-agreed significance. This kind of research project is so unusual that when we read the findings – whether on the parked cars in a Parisian street or the size of the portions in a Bolton chippie – we experience both the shock of recognition and the shock of the new.

This book is also about the ‘infra-ordinary’ – the unremarkable and unremarked upon aspects of our lives. I should begin by warning you that, if you profess an interest in this overlooked research area (which to a certain extent you have already done by picking up this book), you will probably need to develop a thick skin. Some people may accuse you of trying to rediscover what a certain strain of English pragmatism likes to call ‘the bleeding obvious’. I am often asked, with benevolent bemusement, why I study such obscure topics as the symbolism of the lunch break, the history of crossing the road or the politics of sitting on sofas. Sometimes, perhaps while investigating a recherché fact about the prawn mayonnaise sandwich, I have wondered this myself. We expect scholars to have a specialism, a particular expertise that marks them out from non-experts – and when it comes to familiar things like eating prawn sandwiches, crossing the road or sofa-sitting, everyone is a sort of expert.

But while we all experience these activities, we rarely give much thought to them, largely because they are social habits rather than individual idiosyncrasies. Working away at our office desks, sitting in meeting rooms, eating ready meals, flipping through the TV channels with the remote control – these are all part of what the German critic Siegfried Kracauer calls ‘a life that belongs to no one and exhausts everyone’.¹¹ We share these habits with others but have little personal investment in them. Activities like queuing and commuting cannot easily be appropriated as part of a consumer ‘lifestyle’, one of the ways in which, since at least the 1950s, we have deliberately sought to give meaning to our otherwise unconscious daily lives by making them serve a specific self-image or creative impulse. Instead, they make up the constant, unnoticed background noise of our lives.

The silence of daily life can be deafening – and you can tell a lot about a society from the things it does all the time but rarely examines. Meaning lies buried in the most unlikely places. What Mass-Observation’s homegrown anthropology showed was that the divide between the ‘meaningful’ rituals of so-called primitive societies and the ‘meaningless’ routines of modern Britain was not as straightforward as people assumed. When we use the word ‘ritual’ in its anthropological sense we tend to imagine some kind of significant tribal occasion like a marriage, funeral or rite-of-passage ceremony. But rituals can be found in daily activities like holding a fork, tying shoelaces or shaking hands, which people do forgetfully without seeing them as meaningful at all. In fact, the meanings we attach to these activities are all the more powerful because they are ignored. Our daily habits are mechanical actions that we do unthinkingly; but they can also tell us about our collective attitudes, ideas and mythologies – our ways of making sense of the world and our lives.

Habits are traditionally associated with repetition and inertia. But habits also have histories; it’s just that we are rarely aware of them. ‘The history of the Victorian Age will never be written,’ argued an overly pessimistic Lytton Strachey in 1918, because ‘we know too much about it’.¹² The same problem of over-familiarity applies to the history of daily life. The very nature of habits and routines, as activities that we do again and again, makes it hard for us to think of them as taking place in historical time. Daily life seems to be endless and without origin: the way things have always been, always will be. Even in the very recent past, however, we come across the most bizarre, mysterious routines that seemed entirely normal and uninteresting to contemporaries. Thanks to Mass-Observation and other sources, we have some idea of what it was like to smoke a cigarette or drink beer in a pub in the 1930s and 1940s. But we don’t know much about how those habits changed in the intervening years. So in this book I try to unravel a sort of alternative history of post-war Britain – one that does for habits and routines what other historians have done for more momentous political, social or lifestyle changes. Although the focus is on Britain, part of the story I want to relate is how our national routines became caught up with international trends, particularly from across the Atlantic. The smallest details of mundane life can tell us stories about much larger national and global changes. Unconsidered trifles can be clues to more significant, subterranean shifts in society. There is always a reason why we carry out even the most habitual activities – and those reasons are rooted in history, politics and culture.

This book owes its title not only to the fact that queuing is a seminal daily experience – which I analyse in more detail later on – but also to the sense that investigating the quotidian involves unlearning the obvious, looking again at what we think we have noticed already. And one way of paying this kind of sustained attention to the banal is to focus on the pattern of the day itself – the daily grind, what Parisians poetically call ‘métro, boulot, dodo’ (commuting, working, sleeping). Writers have for a long time used the structure of the day to paint a kaleidoscopic picture of society and look again at neglected areas of everyday life. In a 1712 Spectator essay, ‘The hours of London’, an early example of this genre, Richard Steele claims that we can learn much ‘from the enumeration of so many insignificant matters and occurrences’.¹³ The anonymous bestseller Low Life (1752) extended Steele’s idea into a book-length tour through twenty-four hours of London life. The young Charles Dickens, an inveterate metropolitan perambulator, wrote chronological accounts of a morning and night of London street life in Sketches by Boz (1836).¹⁴ His protégé, George Augustus Sala, went on to publish Twice Round the Clock (1858), a kind of tourist’s guide to ordinary London life which begins at 4 a.m. in Billingsgate market and ends at 3 a.m. the next morning with the night charges at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. Modernist classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) also use the structure of a single day in a modern city to juxtapose the profound and the banal, the weightiest matters of life and death with the most trivial quotidian detail. All these books use chronology as a great leveller, a way of deferring the question of whether these familiar activities are significant enough to write about. In the structure of a single day, everything receives roughly the same amount of attention – however dull or boring it might at first seem.

This book similarly uses the pattern of a single day in order to explore the hidden meanings and histories of daily life. It has sixteen chapters, each covering a routine activity, roughly one for each hour of the day from getting up to going to bed. Some of these routines would be immediately familiar to anyone alive at the end of the Second World War: having breakfast (although they would be horrified by our propensity to skip it or skimp on it), commuting (although they didn’t call it that) and queuing (although it took up much more of their time, and the queuing barriers and recorded voices announcing ‘cashier number one, please’ would have seemed like sci-fi inventions). Other habits – checking emails, watching telly, eating ready meals – would be almost entirely new and strange to them, but they might detect some residue of older social habits even in these activities. All the habits I explore have been included for two reasons: they are near-universal (my apologies if you do not work in some sort of office, but the majority of workers do and the proportion is rising) and are done without much deliberation, and certainly without giving much thought to their histories.

In the following chapters, I investigate a series of uninteresting events that unfolded recently across Britain. Millions of people woke up and had instant coffee and a cereal bar for breakfast. They all rushed for the train and stood pressed up against each other in a crowded carriage. They all arrived at the office, went to their desks and spent the morning there, occasionally getting up to go to the photocopier or the staff kitchen for a gossip. At lunchtime, they all stood in the queue at the bank, then they all bought a sandwich and came back to eat it at their desks. They all checked their emails, and then nipped outside for a smoke. They all had to attend a boring staff meeting. At half past five, they all walked out of the office, weaving in between the rush-hour traffic. They all had a quick, after-work drink with each other, then they all went home and stuck a ready meal in the microwave. They all ate it on the sofa while zapping through the television channels. After they had all watched the late-night weather forecast, they all went upstairs, tucked themselves up in bed and drifted off to sleep. Nothing out of the ordinary happened: nobody became ill, got the sack, married, divorced, gave birth or died. It seems to be a story without a protagonist or a plot – just one thing after another. I think we had better start at the beginning.